The past few years has witnessed the ever-increasing availability of relatively cheap, low power wireless data communication services, networks and devices, promising near wire speed transmission and reliability. One technology in particular, described in the IEEE Standard 802.11b-1999 Supplement to the ANSI/IEEE Standard 802.11, 1999 edition, collectively incorporated herein fully by reference, and more commonly referred to as “802.11b” or “WiFi”, has become the darling of the information technology industry and computer enthusiasts alike as a wired LAN/WAN alternative because of its potential 11 Mbps effective throughput, ease of installation and use, and transceiver component costs make it a real and convenient alternative to wired 10 BaseT Ethernet and other cabled data networking alternatives. With 802.11b, workgroup-sized networks can now be deployed in a building in minutes, a campus in days instead of weeks since the demanding task of pulling cable and wiring existing structures is eliminated. Moreover, 802.11b compliant wireless networking equipment is backwards compatible with the earlier 802.11 1M/2 Mbps throughput standard, thereby further reducing deployment costs in legacy wireless systems.
802.11b achieves relatively high payload data transmission rates or effective throughput via the use of orthogonal class modulation in general, and, more particularly, 8-chip complementary code keying (“CCK”) and a 11 MHz chipping rate to bear the payload. As such, previously whitened or scrambled bitstream data of interest is mapped into nearly orthogonal sequences (or CCK code symbols) to be transmitted, where each chip of the CCK code symbol is quaternary phase modulated using QPSK (“quadrature phase shift keying”) modulation techniques. Meanwhile the common phase of each CCK symbol is jointly determined by the current and previous symbols using differential QPSK or DQPSK modulation scheme. Subsequent conversion into the analog domain prepares these CCK symbols for delivery over a wireless medium RF modulated on a carrier frequency within the internationally recognized 2.4 GHz ISM band to form the payload or PLCP Service Data Unit of an 802.11b complaint Physical Layer Convergence Procedure (“PLCP”) frame. The high-rate physical layer PLCP preamble and header portions are still modulated using the 802.11 compliant Barker spreading sequence at an 11 MHz chipping rate. In particular, the preamble (long format—144 bits, short format—72 bits) is universally modulated using DBPSK (“differential binary phase shift keying”) modulation resulting in a 1 Mbps effective throughput, while the header portion may be modulated using either DBPSK (long preamble format) or DQPSK (short preamble format) to achieve a 2 Mbps effective throughput.
An IEEE 802.11b compliant receiver receives and downconverts an incident inbound RF signal to recover an analog baseband signal bearing the PLCP frame, and then digitizes and despreads this signal to recover the constituent PLCP preamble, header and payload portions in sequence. The preamble and header portions are Barker correlated and then either DBPSK or DQPSK demodulated based on the preamble format used to recover synchronization data and definitional information concerning the received PLCP frame, including the data rate (Signal field in the PLCP header) and octet length (Length field in the PLCP header) of the variable-length payload or PSDU portion. The CCK encoded symbols forming the PLCP payload portion are each correlated against 64 candidate waveforms in received per symbol sequence in combination with DQPSK demodulation to verify and reverse map each into the underlying bitstream data of interest, at either 4 bits per symbol (5.5 Mbps) or 8 bits per symbol (11 Mbps) increments.
The major benefit CCK offers is strong inherent resistance to multipath interference, which is likely to be encountered in in-building transceiver deployment. However, in an effort to match occupied channel bandwidth of legacy base 802.11 systems, 802.11b compliant CCK modulation uses the same 11 MHz chipping rate, thereby limiting effective throughput to a maximum 11 Mbps effective data throughput. While acceptable for some applications, this data rate is deemed too slow for certain “broadband” applications such as full-screen streaming video and interactive gaming. 802.11b's sibling communications scheme, defined in the 1999 IEEE 802.11a Supplement to the ANSI/IEEE Standard 802.11, 1999 edition (“802.11a”) offers a higher effective throughput (up to 54 Mbps), but sacrifices backwards compatibility with 802.11b, and requires data transmission in the 5 GHz band which is not generally available outside North America. The forthcoming IEEE 802.11g high-rate PHY extension attempts to address 802.11a's backwards compatibility issue through specifying dual 802.11b and 802.11a compliant transceivers, but this adds cost, complexity and power consumption to the very price sensitive, consumer-oriented mobile devices which stand to benefit most from high speed wireless data communications.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to define a wireless data communications scheme which economically increases effective throughput over 802.11b compliant devices while maintaining backwards compatibility with such devices, thereby fully leveraging the worldwide benefits of ISM transmission and a large installed base of 802.11b systems.